June 01, 2018

Part-Time Workers Are Less Likely to Get a Pay Raise

A recent FEDS Notes article summarized some interesting findings from the Board of Governors' 2017 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking. One set of responses that caught my eye explored the connection between part-time employment and pay raises. The report estimates that about 70 percent of people working part-time did not get a pay increase over the past year (their pay stayed the same or went down). In contrast, only about 40 percent of full-time workers had no increase in pay.

This pattern is broadly consistent with what we see in the Atlanta Fed's Wage Growth Tracker data. As the following chart indicates, the population of part-time workers (who were also employed a year earlier) is generally less likely to get an increase in the hourly rate of pay than their full-time counterparts. Median wage growth for part-time workers has been lower than for full-time workers since 1998.

This wage growth premium for full-time work is partly accounted for by the fact that the typical part-time and full-time worker are different along several dimensions. For example, a part-time worker is more likely to have a relatively low-skilled job, and wage growth tends to be lower for workers in low-skilled jobs.

As the chart shows, the wage growth gap widened considerably in the wake of the Great Recession. The share of workers who are in part-time jobs because of slack business conditions increased across industries and occupation skill levels, and median part-time wage growth ground to a halt.

While part-time wage growth has improved since then, the wage growth gap is still larger than it used to be. This larger gap appears to be attributable to a rise in the share of part-time employment in low-skilled jobs since the recession. In particular, relative to 2007, the share of part-time workers in the Wage Growth Tracker data in low-skilled jobs has increased by about 3 percentage points, whereas the share of full-time workers in low-skilled jobs has remained essentially unchanged. Note that what is happening here is that more part-time jobs are low skilled than before, and not the other way around. Low-skilled jobs are about as likely to be part-time now as they were before the recession.

How does this shift affect an assessment of the overall tightness of today's labor market? Looking at the chart, the answer is probably “not much.” As measured by the Wage Growth Tracker, median wage growth for both full-time and part-time workers has not been accelerating recently. If the labor market were very tight, then this is not what we would expect to see. The modest rise in average hourly earnings in the June 1 labor report for May 2018 to 2.7 percent year over year, even as the unemployment rate declined to an 18-year low, seems consistent with that view. A reading on the Wage Growth Tracker for May should be available in about a week.

John Robertson, a senior policy adviser in the Atlanta Fed's research department

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